National Book Award finalist Motherless child, failed apprentice, autodidact, impossibly odd lover, Jean-Jacques Rousseau burst onto the 18th-century scene as a literary provocateur whose works electrified readers from the start. In this biography Leo Damrosch mines Rousseau's books—The Social Contract, one of the greatest works on political theory and a direct influence on the French and American revolutions; Émile, a groundbreaking treatise on education; and the introspective autobiography Confessions—and shows them as being uncannily alive and provocative even today. More importantly, he integrates the story of these extraordinarily original writings with the tumultuous life that produced them.

"Rousseau pioneered the concept that ideas fell out of experience, and the erratic, inventive urgency of the life is all here. A delight to read, Damrosch comes as close to Rousseau's authentic self as we are likely to get."—NYTimes